This invention relates to fingerprint sensors and navigation devices and more particularly to apparatus and methods for integrating fingerprint sensors and navigation devices.
Navigation devices, such as pointing devices (e.g., mice, touchpads, trackballs, pointing sticks, etc), buttons, joysticks, and directional pads or buttons, are increasingly common in today's electronic devices, including computers, cell phones, PDAs, music players, calculators, and other GUI-based devices. These navigation devices may enable a user to quickly navigate between screens, icons, pages, lines, files, folders, windows, tabs, or the like on a GUI of an electronic device. Nevertheless, as electronic devices continue to shrink and provide ever expanding functionality, real estate on these devices is becoming increasingly scarce. Thus, many electronic devices require navigation devices that are compact while still being ergonomic and easy to use.
Access control is also a significant concern with modern electronic devices due to their ability to store increasing amounts of private, sensitive, or confidential information. Although reusable passwords are probably the most common technique to authenticate and identify a user of a device, other techniques are also being developed to counter the numerous ways that reusable passwords may be compromised. For example, fingerprint sensors provide one potential method for identifying and authenticating a user. Fingerprints, like various other biometric characteristics, are based on an unalterable personal characteristic. Nevertheless, fingerprint sensors or other biometric devices may also require valuable surface-area in order to be implemented on many of today's electronic devices.
In view of the foregoing, what are needed are apparatus and methods for integrating navigation devices and fingerprint sensors in order to conserve valuable surface area on today's electronic devices, which may include computers, cell phones, PDAs, music players, video players, calculators, navigation electronics (i.e, GPS devices) and the like. Ideally, an integrated fingerprint sensor and navigation device would be easy to use and would utilize advanced fingerprint sensors that are currently on the market or under development. As will become evident herein, apparatus and methods in accordance with the invention provide such solutions in an elegant manner.